>"Today, the dominant type of money is the one created by banks, i.e. fiat money."

Governments, not banks.

Money is a tool of exchange, the material form of the principle that people who wish to deal with each other must do so voluntarily, giving value for value.  Money is a tool.  Fiat, enforced at the point of a gun can't make it valuable in the long term. 

Yeah, you are right.  This is essentially the reverse of Gresham's law.  Good money (aka bitcoin and other things backed by assets) will eventually drive out bad.  People won't accept anything for the long term that is going to be inflated away.  Not to mention all the other benefits of bitcoin. 

Eventually people will realize that fiat not backed by anything is worth less (and eventually worthless) in the long term.  In the short term politicians can get away with devaluing a currency but reality catches up with their shenanigans eventually.  It is only a question of when.  An asset/currency/token/etc such as bitcoin illustrates the costs of holding fiat for the long term and helps expose that the emperor has no clothes. 

Particularly if you know that you are going to be discussing bitcoin, why wouldn't you at least bone up on some basics?  Or perhaps it was just an opportunity for both of them to get some press without having to actually do anything.


Did Max provide answers he would regard as correct?:

How many total bitcoin are there ever going to be in existence?  20,999,999.9769 , so slightly less than 21 million. 
How often does the difficulty adjustment adjust? Every 2016 blocks, or 2 weeks, roughly
What’s the core hashing algorithm called? SHA-256
How often, on average, do new blocks appear?  10 minutes is the goal.
Is Craig Wright Satoshi Nakamoto? Lol.  No.

Yeah, and not just banks facing challenges.  Government too with their profligate spending and consequent huge interest costs which are in reality causing the people of various countries to face challenges.  When your interest costs (like in the US) are more than $1 trillion per year due to insane spending policies there are few choices, one of which is inflating your way out of the problem which then hurts every single citizen.  But the "something for nothing" crowd like AOC are either too stupid to understand the issue or have decided they'd be willing to destroy the currency and thus the country to obtain power.

"What makes this year's boom so remarkable is that it is not being driven by retail investors. "

Hopefully the smart retail investors are already well positioned for this.  Who knows though.  Plenty of peoplehad the knowledge and opportunity to get involved in bitcoin but few actually did anything and then end up regretting it.

Given the current level of inflation, the number of times Argentina has defaulted on their debt, devalued their currency, added currency controls and destroyed their economy by inflation in the past compared with the above, it is extremely ironic that they would be even discussing bitcoin since it is an extraordinarily hard currency over time.  It is essentially the Anti-Argentinian peso and would neuter their ability to defraud the people of Argentina and the people who loan money to Argentina from around the world by devaluing the currency.

Maybe it will help the people of Argentina get out from under the thumb of their oppressive politicians.  Of course they keep voting the same type of politician in periodically by falling for the same "something for nothing", "my right to force someone else to pay for my choices" socialist rhetoric.

The fact that there are bureaucrats who have to approve something like this says a lot about the degree of freedom remaining in the US and in the world.  In a free country/world, adults should be free to enter into contracts like this without a hack like Gensler having to approve it or not.

Investors all over need to think about protecting themselves from inflation and authoritarians.   The combination will rob people of their wealth even if it is "only" 2-5% per year.  Global chaos and rampant printing money to fund insane schemes and military conflicts would only make it worse.  PMs and bitcoin are two way to help protect oneself.  And ETF holding "physical" bitcoin vs futures will make it easy for a lot of people to protect some of their money.  Even if on average they only choose to protect a few percent, the numbers are huge.

If an ETF is approved, Fidelity, Schwab, BlackRock and others will no doubt bring a lot of fiat to the table from retirement accounts and non retirement accounts.  It will be a game changer particularly with the proximity to the halving.

Yeah, what the heck is all this about?   And did they consider the gift tax implications here?  A 709 is required and MK would be paying the gift tax on it which is 40%.  So he'd be giving 10000 bitcoin and then having to sell 4000 for the tax, but then would owe a capital gains tax on the 4000 so would need to sell another 1000 to pay that which would need another 240 to pay that which would need another 60....
So in short he'd need to have around 16000 bitcoins in order to gift 10000. 

And (as you asked), does he have that many remaining - 16000 - and if so why would he do it? 

The combination of an ETF (if approved) and the halving, may be a huge catalyst.  Since prices are set at the margin and new supply is dropping quite quickly the impact of even $155 billion would be huge.  With around 900 bitcoins per day going to 450, that amount of "new" money will have an outside impact.  :-)

Have the prices really already been priced in at the halving?  I would argue now.  Perhaps in the very short term you could consider that (e.g. 1-3 months?) but 9-12 months later it seems now.  :-)

And I agree that the impact of the ETF approval may be priced in, but the impact of the ETF investments over time probably hasn't. 

Who knows for sure though....ask me in 5 years. lol
:-)

What is more likely is that this rumor that it is to "control the masses" is being spread by "agencies" because they know that bitcoin is a tool that allows the masses to avoid the control by the governments, protect themselves, their assets and families, be pseudo-anonymous, and be secure from censorship of payments.  Reverse psychology here.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/fidelity-bitcoin-401k-accounts-5e359383

It has taken them a while, but at least they seem to have understood the value bitcoin brings people.

 
https://www.barrons.com/articles/bitcoin-etf-grayscale-how-invest-5e6b7393

I believe they are correct about the inevitability of a BTC ETF.  However, "priced in"?  Perhaps in the short term it is priced in, but in the long term that seems very doubtful.  The question is: what is the absolute demand for bitcoin from people who don't want to open an account at an exchange or hold their own coins?  Just in my experience with people, people are often lazy.  If they can buy it at Schwab, Vanguard, Fidelity, Merrill, eTrade etc in their brokerage or IRA that makes it much easier and less intimidating.  

It is the opposite of cold storage, so why not just keep the keys in plain text in a gmail account?  I'd trust google more than Ledger, of course that doesn't say much since I wouldn't trust either of them with anything like that.

Lightning helps with the circulating currency issue.  Likewise, at some point an order of magnitude or two from now I believe that bitcoin will reach nearly fiat equilibrium except for of course the increase in fiat price due to fiat inflation and smaller increases in use cases.

"Free" energy such as fusion would go a long way to this.

One "simple" way would be to change the albedo of the planet.  Paint all rooftops white, and make roadways and parking lots white.  That alone would change the direction of the planetary temperature and would be significantly less expensive and disruptive than other options.

Yeah, I read that article too and it really didn't have a lot of substance.  There are catalysts, halving, potential ETFs, more usage cases etc. that weren't mentioned.  The Fed is impacting it short term for traders and long term for investors due to perpetual inflation at various levels, long term hard money (backed by math) wins.

I think this is great news for bitcoin both from a price perspective and from a long term use perspective.  The long term goal in my thoughts has been to make bitcoin usable for many things, from transactions, to transferring real world items, to protecting oneself from the power-hungry people in the world, to providing censorship resistance to everyone in the world etc. 

Speculators are all well and good and it isn't something one would want to end.  They have helped launch bitcoin from less than a penny to wherever it is right now $25k-30k.  The way to get to the usability standpoint is to reach higher adoption and ownership.  Even if ETF owners are doing some speculation, this could easily take bitcoin on its next leg up and at some point, whether another order or two or three of magnitude, then one won't need to get out of bitcoin, one can transact in bitcoin without as much thought about price appreciation.  Once more people stay in bitcoin, KYC etc won't be relevant.

In short, if an ETF is approved which does seem more likely now, that will bring a lot of new capital in which gets closer to the point above.  :-)